The National Association of Realtors reports on existing home sales tomorrow and the data in the graphic below from this NY Times story is not likely to show much improvement, if any. In fact, with the slow, winter selling season quickly approaching, America’s underwater home problem is about to get a little worse before next spring.

Yes, that’s right. The entire cities of Las Vegas and Orlando are underwater while Phoenix along with a number of cities in California and Florida are not far behind.

It looks like China’s housing bubble is teetering, sales this fall down by half from the level of a year ago, and the Australian housing market has looked shaky all year, but that Canadian housing bubble seems nearly indestructible, charts like the one below from this Globe & Mail report now a real head scratcher for those of us south of the border.

Having just visited Calgary two months ago, I can attest to the residential areas looking a lot like Southern California in about 2005, but Toronto and Vancouver are apparently experiencing even bigger booms, as noted in the Globe & Mail report above, about the only question for residents being which big city will beat the other in price gains this year.

Last month, Toronto home prices rose 6.5 percent from a year ago, down from a 9.3 percent pace the month before, and with annual price gains in Vancouver recently falling from 20+ percent to 10.6 percent, a real battle is brewing. They note that “overall the market continues to appear healthy” and an economist offers only a mild cautionary note, words that sound eerily familiar to us in the U.S.

The odds of a government sponsored principal writedown program seem to be increasing by the day, aided by the attention now being focused on the big banks by Occupy Wall Street. If homeowners don’t get their bailout, we’ll be seeing a lot more of this as there are still more than a million homes either already in foreclosure or headed that way.

From the Nick Anderson archive at the Houston Chronicle.

The combination of the Federal Reserve’s freakishly low interest rates that punish savers and tighter lending standards for mortgages by big banks have created something of a cottage industry in intra-family home loans, at least according to this story in USA Today.

In 1991, Dan Driscoll of Towson, Md., and his wife, Theresa, wanted to buy a house, but the lowest mortgage rate they could find was 9%. Meanwhile, Driscoll’s parents, who were retired, were earning 3% on their savings. At Driscoll’s suggestion, his parents financed his $75,000 mortgage at a 6% rate.

Now, Driscoll has taken on a different role. Earlier this year, Driscoll’s son Dan, 31, expressed interest in buying a larger home in his father’s neighborhood. Instead of paying 4.5% for a traditional mortgage, Dan borrowed the money from his father at a 4.25% rate. The arrangement also enabled Dan to avoid paying closing costs, appraisal fees and other expenses charged by a traditional lender, Driscoll says.

Apparently there are a number of issues involved here that can easily get you in trouble with the IRS and anyone who did a deal with their folks a year or two ago might be broaching the awkward subject of refinancing right about now, but, overall, this is another good example of how people can beat Ben Bernanke at his own low-interest rate game.